The recent October 26 deadline for releasing 50-year-old
JFK-assassination records of the CIA and other federal agencies provided an
opportunity for people to promote their favorite JFK assassination theories.
The Russians did it. Fidel Castro did it. The U.S. national-security
establishment did it. The Mafia did it. A lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald did
it.
The reaction among some
people was predictable: “Oh, there are so many JFK assassination theories that
I guess we’ll never know what really happened.” Or “It’s all so overwhelming
and I just don’t want to be pulled into the rabbit hole.”
Actually, however,
understanding the various conspiracy and non-conspiracy theories in the JFK
assassination is really not that difficult. All it takes is some critical
thinking, analysis, and common sense.
There are three major
conspiracy theories and one non-conspiracy theory (i.e., the lone-nut theory).
Let’s examine each one. I believe you’ll see why the matter isn’t as difficult
as mainstream writers and commentators make it out to be.
JFK
Assassination Theory One
The
Russian (i.e., Soviets) and Cuban Communists,
in a Conspiracy with Lee Harvey Oswald, Did It.
in a Conspiracy with Lee Harvey Oswald, Did It.
The
basic idea here is that Lee Harvey Oswald, a purported communist, got together
with the Russian and Cuban governments, which were communist, and assassinated
Kennedy. The Kennedy Autopsy Best Price: $10.01 Buy New $9.95(as of 09:20 EST - Details)
We saw this theory recently
resurface in the mainstream press when President Trump, on the very October 26
deadline for releasing those long-secret records, decided to let the CIA
continue keeping its records relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City secret
from the American people. Proponents of this particular conspiracy theory said,
“Oh what a shame! We could have learned more details about how Oswald conspired
with the Russians and Cubans to assassinate Kennedy.”
It is easy to establish the
fallaciousness of this particular conspiracy theory.
First, no motive. Neither the
Russians nor the Cubans had any motive to kill Kennedy. In fact, their desire was
the exact opposite. They wanted Kennedy to live out his term and even be
reelected. The last thing they wanted was for Kennedy to die in office and be
replaced by Lyndon Johnson or be defeated in the 1964 election by Republican
Barry Goldwater.
Why did the Russians and
Cubans prefer Kennedy? The answer is simple: Kennedy was reaching out to them
in a spirit of peace and friendship at the time he was killed.
By the time the Cuban Missile
Crisis was over in 1962, Kennedy had come to reject the Cold War, anti-Russia
mindset, philosophy, and policies of the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, and the rest of
the U.S. national-security establishment. He also had rejected their deeply
ingrained notion that America was in grave danger of being taken over by the
communists.
Kennedy’s anti-Cold War
mentality had gradually evolved, beginning with the CIA’s debacle at the Bay of
Pigs and the deceitful way in which the CIA had tried to manipulate Kennedy
during that crisis. Kennedy was so angry at the CIA that he fired its much-revered
director, Alan Dulles, and is reputed to have vowed to tear the CIA into a
thousand pieces.
Kennedy’s anti-Cold War
mindset evolved further when the Pentagon presented him with a plan for a
preemptive all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and with a top-secret
plan known as Operation Northwoods, which advocated a fraudulent pretext for
initiating a military invasion of Cuba. After one meeting with the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Kennedy indignantly remarked to an aide, “And we call ourselves the
human race.”
It all came to a head during
the Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA and the Pentagon were advocating a bombing
attack followed by a U.S. invasion of the island, acts that we now know would
almost certainly have resulted in all-out nuclear war. Kennedy said no and
instead negotiated an end to the crisis by promising that the United States
would not invade Cuba again. The generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff
considered Kennedy’s deal to be appeasement of the communists and one of the
worst defeats in U.S. history.
By this time, Kennedy had
lost all trust and confidence in the CIA and the military and had come to
reject their Cold War mindset and direction. That’s when Kennedy changed
direction, rejecting the Cold War mentality and framework that the Pentagon and
the CIA had foisted on America after World War II.
Kennedy announced this
dramatic shift in foreign policy at his famous Peace Speech at American
University on June 10, 1963, which he prepared without consulting with or even
advising the CIA or the military. Those of them who were in the audience that
day had to have been stunned, angry, and outraged.
Kennedy said that it was time
to end the Cold War and to establish peaceful and friendly relations with the
communist world. It was a shocking notion, at least to the Pentagon, the CIA,
and the FBI, which were convinced that there could never be peaceful
coexistence with communists. Although the speech was, naturally, not
well-received by the U.S. national-security establishment, it was in Russia,
where Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered that a transcript of the speech
be published all across the Soviet Union, the first time that had ever been
done.
Kennedy’s Peace Speech was
followed by his Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the Pentagon and the CIA
vehemently opposed and which the Russians agreed to. Kennedy successfully
persuaded Congress to approve it.
Kennedy
ordered a partial pull-out of U.S. troops in Vietnam and told aides that he
intended to pull out all the rest after he won the 1964 election. The CIA and
the Pentagon believed that a withdrawal from Vietnam would cause the dominoes
to begin falling to the communists, posing a grave threat to U.S.
national security. Inside the Assassinati... Best Price: $19.75 Buy New $23.41(as of 06:40 EST - Details)
Worst of all, from the
standpoint of the Pentagon and the CIA, President Kennedy initiated secret
personal negotiations with Khrushchev and Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro to end the
Cold War. While the CIA undoubtedly learned about the negotiations through
wiretaps on Cuban officials at the UN in New York City, Kennedy did everything
he could to keep the negotiations secret from both the CIA and the military. In
fact, on the very day that Kennedy was assassinated, he had a personal emissary
having lunch with Castro to discuss an end to the Cold War (and implicitly the
decades-long U.S. economic embargo against the Cuban people).
Now, ask yourself a simple
question: Why would the Soviets and the Cubans want to kill Kennedy? Why would
they want to elevate Johnson, who was still a died-in-the-wool Cold Warrior
whose mindset mirrored that of the Pentagon and the CIA and who would quickly
reverse JFK’s attempts to reach out to the Russians and Cubans in a spirt of
peace and friendship? That would not have been rational.
Second, the Russians and the
Cubans would never have entered into a conspiracy with an American assassin,
especially one that, on the surface at least, wasn’t exactly a bastion of
stability. They would have known that if Oswald were arrested, he could easily
be turned by being offered a sweet deal by prosecutors to testify against his
co-conspirators. If the Russians were going to assassinate a U.S. president and
wanted to keep their involvement secret, they would have relied on a foreign
agent who they could trusted 100 percent to take the fall if he were caught and
not implicate the Russians and Cubans, especially since that would likely have
led to nuclear war.
Third, if Oswald were in a
conspiracy with the communists, he never would have talked to investigators
after being arrested, and he never would have claimed that he was being framed.
A conspiracy with Soviet and Cuban officials would have been carefully planned.
The Russians and Cubans are very familiar with America’s criminal-justice
system. As part of such a conspiracy, Oswald would have been told that in the
event he was arrested, he should keep absolutely silent and to wait for a
pre-retained attorney to represent him.
Fourth,
there is the JFK autopsy, an Achilles Heel of the U.S. national-security
establishment in the JFK assassination. As I show in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, the
military conducted a fraudulent autopsy as part of its cover-up in the JFK
assassination.
If the Russians and the
Cubans had orchestrated the assassination of a U.S. president, would the
Pentagon and the CIA have tried to cover up for them with a fraudulent autopsy?
On the contrary, they hated the communists. They would have gone after them
with all guns blaring and all nuclear bombs ignited. Don’t forget, after all,
Operation Northwoods, which they presented to Kennedy and which advocated a
fraudulent pretext for invading Cuba. Also, don’t forget the Bay of Pigs
invasion.
So, the thought that the
Pentagon and the CIA, on the very evening of the assassination, would suddenly
decide to conduct a fraudulent autopsy to protect their new-found communist
friends in Russia and Cuba is, well, not very realistic.
Keep in mind something else
about the JFK autopsy. The plan to conduct a fraudulent autopsy was launched
immediately after JFK was declared dead. That was when Lyndon Johnson ordered a
team of Secret Service agents to immediately bring JFK’s body to Dallas Love
Field, where Johnson was patiently waiting for it. Loyally following orders and
brandishing guns, screaming profanities, and implicitly implying that they
would kill anyone who got in their way, that team of Secret Service agents
forced its way out of Parkland Hospital, ignoring the objections of the Dallas
County medical examiner, who pointed out that Texas state law required an
autopsy to be conducted by him. Thus, there is a big timeline problem for the
Russia-Cuba conspiracy theory: the autopsy plan was launched before U.S.
officials had any evidence of possible Russia-Cuba involvement in the
assassination.
JFK
Assassination Theory Two
A
Lone-Nut Did It
The
idea here is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone-nut former U.S. Marine communist
who suddenly decided to kill President Kennedy. JFKu2019s War with the... Check Amazon for Pricing.
There are several problems
with this theory.
First, no motive. Oswald had
no motive whatsoever to kill Kennedy. In fact, motive runs in the opposite
direction. Don’t forget: in June 1963, Kennedy announced a change of direction
for America. In his Peace Speech at American University, he publicly announced
an end to the Cold War and a new era of peaceful coexistence and friendship
with the communist world. Later, he negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with
the Soviets.
If Oswald really was a
communist, why would he want to kill a president who was reaching out to the
communist world in a spirit of peace and friendship, especially knowing that
his replacement, Lyndon Johnson, was cut out of same ideological Cold War cloth
as the Pentagon and the CIA?
If Oswald was doing it for
fame or to show that he was as big a man as Kennedy, as many proponents of the
lone-nut theory claim, then why deny doing it? Wouldn’t a man who was seeking
fame or glory for killing a president want the whole world to know what he had
done?
Second, Oswald’s actions
after the assassination are not characteristic of someone who has just
assassinated a president.
For example, Oswald
supposedly took the time to hide the rifle. Why would he do that? He would have
known that investigators would have searched the entire floor. What good would
hiding the rifle do? Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone who has just
assassinated the president would do everything he could to escape before the
cops arrived and before the building was closed off, thereby trapping the
assassin on the inside?
Instead, in an assassination
carried out by what would have to be one of the most casual and easygoing
assassins in history, Oswald took the time to put some money into a coke
machine in order to imbibe a soft drink before heading off to, say, Cuba, which
many proponents of the lone-nut theory (and the Soviet-Cuba conspiracy
proponents) claim he planned to do.
That’s not all.
He then casually walked out
of the building, walked a couple of blocks, and then caught a city bus, which
was heading back in the direction of the crime scene! Trapped by a traffic jam,
he got off the bus and decided to take a cab, only in a moment of extreme
Southern chivalry, he offered the first cab he saw to some lady. Later, he
decided to go watch a movie.
Now, ask yourself: If a man
has carefully planned an assassination, doesn’t it stand to reason that he’s
going to carefully plan his escape as well? Isn’t he going to scadattle out of
there as quickly as he can? He’s going to have his transportation carefully
worked out. If he’s going to Cuba, he’s going to have a chartered airplane
ready to fly him out of Dallas. Or at least a bus ticket out of town.
Oswald had none of that. No
motive. And no escape plan.
JFK
Assassination Theory Three
A
U.S. National Security State Regime-Change Operation
This is the only paradigm in
the JFK assassination that makes any sense and in which all the contradictions,
inconsistencies, and anomalies disintegrate. The operation was no different in
principle from the ones carried out in places like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and
Cuba and for the same reason: to protect U.S. national-security from a
political leader whose policies were perceived to pose a grave threat to U.S.
national security.
One
of the fascinating aspects of the Kennedy assassination has always been the
reluctance or the refusal of the mainstream press to consider the matter from
the standpoint of one of the bedrock principles of American jurisprudence — the
presumption of innocence, especially since Oswald was claiming that he was an
innocent man. In fact, not only did Oswald deny that he killed the president,
he went a critically important step further — he The CIA, Terrorism, an...Check Amazon for Pricing. claimed that he was
being framed. The mainstream press has never shown any desire to confront that
possibility and deal with it.
claimed that he was
being framed. The mainstream press has never shown any desire to confront that
possibility and deal with it.
Indeed, they have simply
accepted a set of very pat facts, all of which have all the earmarks of good
frame-up. Moreover, within an hour of the assassination, it was being
conveniently blamed on a purported communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, whose
communist bona fides were being established with a press release by a CIA front
organization in New Orleans called the DRE, almost immediately after Kennedy
was pronounced dead.
As a
kid, Oswald’s favorite television program was I Led Three Lives, which was about a secret FBI
agent who posed as a communist in order to infiltrate communist cells in the
United States and thereby save America from communism.
While
other kids are growing up dreaming of becoming Superman or Batman, it’s a good
bet that Oswald was dreaming of becoming a G-Man, just like the hero in I Led Three Lives.
That would explain why Oswald, as a teenager, would be studying communism — so
that he would be able to become a secret communist infiltrator for the FBI when
he grew up.
Oswald joined the U.S Marine
Corps, which hated communists and wanted to kill communists. In fact, the
Marines, along with other U.S. troops, had just killed millions of communists
in Korea. Would a genuine communist join an agency that killed communists?
Would he join an organization in which he could suddenly be ordered to kill
fellow communists in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Europe, or Cuba?
That makes no sense
whatsoever. It’s simply not logical. But it would make total sense for a young
man whose dream would have been to join FBI as a communist infiltrator,
especially since the Marine Corps was (and is) a primary recruiting place for
the CIA.
If Oswald was a genuine
communist, why would he have been permitted to remain in the military? Recall
that this was the Cold War era and the era of the McCarthy hearings, when U.S.
officials were doing their best to ferret out communists in the army, the State
Department, academia and even Hollywood. Why would they let a self-avowed
communist stay in the Marine Corps and even be stationed at Atsugi Air Force
Base in Japan, where the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane was based? How would
Oswald have learned fluent Russian while in the military, if he hadn’t been
taught it by a military tutor or military language school?
Why? Because the only thing
that makes sense was that Oswald was being trained as one of the CIA’s
top-secret infiltrators into the Soviet Union and into domestic communist
organizations as well.
We know that the CIA and FBI
were infiltrating what they perceived to be communist organizations, such as
the U.S. Communist Party and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In order to do
that, they would have needed infiltrators who knew the communist philosophy
sufficiently well to convince genuine communists that they were genuine
communists too. We also know that the CIA was obsessed with gathering knowledge
about economic and sociological conditions in the Soviet Union. Recruiting a
U.S. Marine to serve as one of its communist infiltrators would have made
perfectly good sense, especially one whose qualifications included a longtime
study of communism with the aim of becoming an communist infiltrator.
That would explain, of
course, why U.S. officials didn’t lay a finger on Oswald after he supposedly
defected to the Soviet Union and promised to give the communists all the
classified information he had acquired as a Marine. Arguably, that’s treason.
And yet, not only did they do nothing to Oswald when he returned home (with a
Russian wife whose uncle worked for Soviet intelligence), they actually helped
pave the way for his return.
No grand jury indictment. No
harassment. No abuse. No torture. Not even an interview. While U.S. officials
were prosecuting and persecuting the likes of Martin Luther King, Dalton Trumbo
and other Hollywood figures, and others for being communists or communist
sympathizers, they let Lee Harvey Oswald, ostensibly an American communist
traitor, skate across the Cold War stage of history with nary a care in the
world.
Think about how they have
treated John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, John
Kiriakou, and Julian Assange. That’s how we would expect them to act against
people who they considered were traitors or enemy sympathizers. Compare their
treatment of those people to the absolutely nothing that they did to Oswald,
notwithstanding the fact that he promised to reveal everything he had learned
in the military, including during his time at Atsugi Air Force Base, to
America’s sworn Cold War enemy, the communist Soviet Union, to which he
supposedly try to defect.
There
can be only one explanation for this: Oswald was an intelligence agent whose
was one of the CIA’s communist infiltrators. That would explain why they didn’t
do anything to him after he ostensibly betrayed his country. CIA & JFK: The Secret ... Check Amazon for Pricing.
It would also explain
Oswald’s behavior in New Orleans and Mexico City in the weeks leading up to the
assassination. They were maneuvering and positioning him, aiming to fortify his
communist bona fides so that they could blame the assassination on a communist,
the surefire way to dissuade people from questioning the official story. It
cannot be a coincidence that one of the favorite tactics of pro-U.S. right-wing
regimes in Latin America, whose personnel were trained at the Pentagon’s School
of the Americas, during the Cold War was to blame covert state-sponsored
assassinations on communists.
Something obviously went
dreadfully wrong with the Mexico City part of the operation because they
quickly shut down that part of the post-assassination investigation and buried
it in secrecy. It’s not surprising that the still-secret records that Trump and
the CIA suppressed on the October 26 deadline included the CIA’s 50-year-old
records relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City.
Motive?
Kennedy’s dramatic shift after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he announced an
end to the Cold War and a reaching out to the Russians and Cubans in a spirit
of peace and friendship. In the eyes of the U.S. national-security
establishment, that posed a grave threat to U.S. national security, in that it
threatened to result in a communist takeover of the United States. Don’t forget
that what Kennedy did was what Arbenz in Guatemala and Castro in Cuba had done
that marked them for a CIA assassination. It was also what Allende in Chile
would do to mark him for assassination and regime change. See FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was
Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of
the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s and who authored the
five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s
Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the
Assassination of JFK.
JFK
Assassination Theory Four
The
Mafia did it.
Actually, this theory makes
some sense, but only with the Mafia serving as a partner of the CIA. As in the
case of the Russians and Cubans, it is virtually impossible for the military to
have devised their fraudulent autopsy plan to cover up an assassination of the
president by the Mafia. That’s because at the time the autopsy plan was
initially launched at Parkland, they wouldn’t have known that the Mafia was
involved in the assassination.
As Americans learned many
years after the JFK assassination, the CIA had entered into a pre-assassination
secret partnership with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. Like the CIA, the
Mafia specialized in assassination, and cover-up, as reflected by the still
unsolved murders of Jimmy Hoffa and Johnny Roselli, the Mafia figure who served
as the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia. It would have posed no problem
for the CIA-Mafia partnership to shift its aim toward Kennedy. That would have
enabled the CIA to orchestrate the assassination, for the Mafia to silence
Oswald, and for the military to conduct the fraudulent autopsy.
Motive? The Mafia wanted to
get rid of Castro as much as the CIA and Pentagon did, especially so that they
could get back into Cuba under a new pro-U.S. dictator, where they could
continue to run their pre-Castro gambling operations, their child-rape
operations, and their heroin and other drug smuggling operations. Also, while
the CIA and the Pentagon hated Kennedy for his anti-Cold War position, the
Mafia hated both John and Robert Kennedy for prosecuting, harassing, and
deporting them.
Conclusion
Thus, there is only one JFK
assassination paradigm that makes sense. We obviously do not have all the
pieces to the puzzle, such as who actually did the shooting, but we do have
enough pieces to see the overall picture in the puzzle. That picture is a
national-security regime-change operation that took place on November 22, 1963,
one no different in principle from other U.S. regime-change operations that
were carried out during the Cold War era, including in Iran (1953), Guatemala
(1954), Cuba (1960 to date), Congo (1961), and Chile (1973), all of which were
intended to protect national security from political leaders whose policies and
behavior were perceived to constitute a grave threat to U.S. national security.
Reprinted
with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of
The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Copyright
© 2017 The Future of Freedom Foundation
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